Where Do You Go When You Fail?
Have you ever had any setbacks or disappointments in your job, your relationships, your friendships, your education, your ministry? Maybe something happened that wasn’t your fault, or maybe it was your fault. Have you ever felt like you let the Lord down? What did you do? Where did you go with your failure, or when you felt like a failure? What’s your instinctive response to challenges and setbacks and disappointments and failures?
For believers, there are two ways we respond to setbacks. We either turn to the Lord, or away from the Lord. We either engage him or avoid him. We avoid him by busying ourselves, focusing on doing better, trying harder, by talking to everyone but him about our problems, by stuffing what we think and feel down and pretending we’re okay and putting on a strong face, by being falsely positive about difficult things because we think Christians can never honestly share their thoughts or emotions, especially with God.
Anticipation then Frustration
In Exodus 5 and 6, we’re going to see how Moses handles a major setback and failure in his life. Chapter 4 ends on a very high note. After almost dying because he disobeyed God’s command for his son to be circumcised (vv. 24-26), he has a joyful reunion with his brother Aaron (vv. 27-28), and they go to Egypt and tell the Israelites what God is going to do (vv. 29-30). The people’s response is incredible: they hear, believe, and worship the Lord (v. 31).
But then in chapter 5 and 6, things start to go south very quickly for Moses, Aaron, and the Israelites. The anticipation of chapter 4 is followed by frustration in chapters 5 and 6. It’s like going to Six Flags and running straight to the Texas Giant and finding a two hour wait, or going to a Chinese buffet and realizing they sesame chicken is out, or getting your dream job and realizing there’s toil in all our work, or getting married and realizing you married a sinner.
How does Moses handle the setback and apparent failure? In these chapters, when Moses faces disappointment and failure, he runs to the Lord with honest faith and the Lord responds with renewing grace.
That’s the big takeaway for us from this text: honest faith is met with renewing grace. We can outline our passage like this: Moses goes to Pharaoh (5:1-21) and Moses goes to the Lord (5:22-6:30).
Moses Goes to Pharaoh
In 5:1-21, Moses goes to Pharaoh, and things go badly. Verse 1 seems rather innocuous, but when you look back at 3:18, you see that Moses doesn’t approach Pharaoh in the way God directed him to. In 3:18, the Lord says that the elders are to go too, but in 5:1 it’s just Moses and Aaron. In 3:18, the Lord speaks of a three-day journey, but that’s omitted in 5:1. In 3:18, the Lord says to approach Pharaoh with the less aggressive, “Let us go,” but Moses uses an imperative, “Send us away!” In 3:18, the Lord even tells Moses to say, “Please,” but in 5:1 there’s no “please.”
The differences between what the Lord tells Moses to say and what he says are subtle, but important. God says he should go more courteously and diplomatically, but Moses goes in guns-blazing, with an abrasive and confrontational tone. Moses goes in to hammer rather than talk to the rock of Pharaoh’s heart. As my mom used to say, “It’s not what you say but how you say it.”
In verse 3, he also adds something the Lord hadn’t said by threatening plagues and the sword if they don’t go. So he’s subtracting from and adding to the word of God. Both of which always lead to disappointment and disaster.
Maybe the excitement of 4:31 led Moses to be over-confident and forget some of what the Lord told him to do. Or maybe his fear is leading him more than his faith. Either way, the results were disastrous.
“Who Is the Lord?”
Pharaoh responds to Moses in verse 2 with, “Who is this Yahweh you’re talking about? And it doesn’t matter because I’m not letting Israel go.” This is either understandable ignorance (if Moses didn’t know God’s name, how could Pharaoh?), or arrogance and defiance.
Maybe it’s a little bit of both. This dismissive attitude toward Israel’s God is indicative of every human heart fallen in sin. But someone like Pharaoh, who set himself up as a god, would never recognize the authority of another God, especially one he hadn’t heard of.
Pharaoh’s question, “Who is Yahweh?” forms the motivation for the coming events. He doesn’t know who Yahweh is, but he’s about to. The Lord is about to take Pharaoh and Egypt to school on who he is. His purpose in the plagues and the deliverance of Israel is that they might know who he is (7:5).
Oppression Increases
Pharaoh says the Israelites must find their own straw and make the same number of bricks, and that the increased work is because they’re “idle” (vv. 8, 17). This is a classic case of a victim being blamed for the tyranny of their oppressor. Pharaoh blames Israel for his evil.
Then he increases Israel’s work so they won’t have time to listen to lies (v. 9). But he’s the one full of lies, and the Lord will turn his lies on his head. In verse 5, he accuses Moses of making the people “rest” from their work. The word “Sabbath” comes from that verb. The God of Israel will provide a Sabbath rest for his people because Yahweh is the antithesis of Pharaoh. And in verse 9, the verb used for “letting heavier work be laid” on the people is used in 10:1 when God “hardens,” or “makes heavy,” Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh oppresses God’s people, so God oppresses him. We always reap what we sow.
In verse 14, things get so bad that the “foremen” (Israelites put in charge of Israelites) are beaten because the quota of bricks isn’t being met. Things are going from bad to worse. They’re being asked to do the impossible and then punished when they can’t do it.
The foremen are furious with Moses. His misstep in his first meeting with Pharaoh, whether intentional deviation from God’s word or not, has cost his people greatly. In the people’s eyes, Moses is a failure who deserves the judgment of God (“The Lord look on you and judge,” v. 21).
Moses Goes to the Lord
What does Moses do? Where does he go with his failure? Verse 22 says that he “turned to the Lord,” not away from the Lord. Moses engaged God instead of avoiding him.
Moses is humble, human, and honest. I’s moments like this that earn Moses the title “humblest person in the world” (Num. 12:3). Humble people turn to the Lord in their failure. We know we should do this, but it’s hard. It’s hard to admit failure. It’s much easier to turn to self-pity or to blame others or to tell ourselves how unfair the world is or to withdraw from God and our community and sulk in shame.
Moses started in the presence of the Lord (3:1-4) and this is where he needed to go to re-start. Moses had matured since chapter 2, when he failed and then ran away (v. 15), to this time when he failed he ran back, back to the Lord.
Moses was humble, but he was also human. In verse 22, he starts his prayer by asking “why” two times. This is our instinctive response when trouble comes, even if the trouble comes as a result of our disobedience or failure. Asking “why” is very normal (eg. the psalms).
Moses is humble, human, and honest. He took his honest thoughts to God, and so begins a long tradition of “truth-telling and truth-talking in biblical prayer.”[1] He doesn’t go to God with cliches. He’s failed, rejected, and confused by God’s apparent lack of involvement in Israel’s desperate situation.
He even says that Pharaoh and God have done “evil,” or “harm,” to Israel (vv. 22-23). He believes that God not doing anything is just as bad as Pharaoh doing terrible things. This is an audacious charge! Are you this honest in your prayers?
But his prayer is infused with biblical truth. Listen to Alec Motyer’s explanation:
“If we cannot blame God, neither can we trust him. This is a very delicate matter…But consider how, in times of crisis, tragedy or trouble others encourage us, or we encourage the distressed, to trust God to be with us and to see us through. But if he was not there when the tragedy happened, when the baby died, the child was killed, the engagement was broken or whatever, how can we be sure that he is here now and can be trusted with our trouble?…We may prefer to think of the Lord ‘permitting’ sinful plans to reach tragic outcomes and allowing the wrongs and sufferings inevitable in a sinful world to remain unchecked. We may prefer to take the more rigorous and biblical way of seeing eternal wisdom presiding in absolute rightness and justice over everything, including what sinners do in their culpability (Acts 2:23) and what eventuates in a world of sin.”[2]
Moses knew that God, as the “I AM WHO I AM,” superintends all things, so he went to God with his complaint, his questions, his frustration over his failure. If God isn’t in charge of the world, then why would we go to him with our setbacks and failures? If he’s not there in the tragedy, then why would we go to him after the tragedy?
This prayer is a lot like Psalm 88, one of the only psalms that doesn’t end on a high note, but the psalm, like Moses’s prayer is full of faith because it’s a prayer to God.
Moses’s complaint rises from an honest faith. How do we complain to God with honest faith? In Numbers 11, the people complain and get burned and then Moses complains and gets blessed (11:1-17). How do we complain about the toast without becoming toast? As Victor Hamilton says, “Whenever the people complain, they complain about God, whereas when Moses complains, he complains to God.”[3]
In the military or in your job, if you have a complaint you have to take it to a superior if you want anything to be done with it. So we take our complaints to God, because he’s in charge and he can handle it. God can take these kinds of complaints because he has incredibly strong self-esteem. The “I AM” doesn’t need anything or anyone, so critique or complaints never get him down.
The Lord’s Response
We know Moses’ prayer is a result of honest faith because of how the Lord responds in 6:1. God responds to Moses’ prayer with grace. He’s not shocked or frustrated by Moses’ charge. He doesn’t reprimand Moses or put him in his place. He simply says, “Just wait and see what I’m about to do to Pharaoh.” He doesn’t excuse Moses’ sin or failure. He simply says, “I will do what I said I will do.”
The Lord’s responds to Moses’s honest faith with renewing grace. Moses’s honest faith takes him deeper into God’s renewing grace. The Lord pours out his grace in verses 2-8. He reminds Moses what he’s done in the past (vv. 2-4), what he’s doing in the present (v. 5), and what he’s going to do in the (very near) future (vv. 6-8).
He says three times, “I am Yahweh” (vv. 2, 6, 8). He says the patriarchs didn’t know him as “Yahweh” (v. 3), but the name “Yahweh” appears 148 times in Genesis! So what does he mean?
He doesn’t mean the name wasn’t used because it obviously was. He means the full meaning of the name wasn’t known. What else is God making known about his name here?
Verse 3 is best explained by verses 4-8, where the Lord says what he’s about to do for his people. He’s going to bring his people out, deliver and redeem them from Egypt (v. 6). Then he’s going to settle them in Canaan (v. 8).
The patriarchs knew God as the One who provided for their needs, but they didn’t know him as Redeemer. To the patriarchs, he was the provider and the promise-maker. In the exodus, God reveals himself as the bondage-breaker and promise-keeper.
God’s response to Moses’ honest faith is line after line about who he is and what he’s done and what he will do. It’s like he takes a big bucket of liquid grace and pours it over Moses’ burning frustration. The Lord doesn’t reprimand Moses; he renews him with his grace.
Moses’s failure doesn’t determine his acceptance. God accepts him out of sheer grace. He’d done nothing to deserve it. In fact, he’d already done a lot to not deserve it. But when he comes to God with his need, what he finds is grace (Heb. 4:16).
A line in a song by Switchfoot from 2000, “Dare You to Move,” says, “Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell.” Grace is found at the point of our need.
The Fear of Failure
In his failure, Moses went to the Lord, and so should we. But there are different ways we experience failure. When we have a nagging sense that we’ve failed even if we haven’t or when we have a fear of failure, we take that to the Lord as well.
Samuel James, in his weekly newsletter last week, talked about how our modern world often makes us feel like we’ve failed, even if we haven’t. Let me read you a bit of what he says:
“Modern life, untethered as it is from givenness and tradition, poses a contradiction. The more we flex our economic and social freedom to move, resign, divorce, and start over again, the more adrift we seem to become in the ocean of decision. Many people struggle to overcome a paralyzing sense that they’ve made the wrong choice, or that something better is passing them by. Like a prisoner who is given a window just big enough to see enough of the outside world to know he’s excluded, socially mobile types cannot go very far before the mere possibility of an alternative suggests regret…Perhaps the only thing that looms larger for the emerging generation of Americans than the desire for success is the fear of failure. Risk aversion is arguably the defining feature of Gen-Z, a generation that is willing to work hard (just look at their extracurriculars at age 10), willing to follow the rules…but not willing to regret.”[4]
Where do you take your nagging sense that you’ve failed, even if you haven’t? Your fear of failure? Your fear that you’ve married the wrong person, taken the wrong job, chose the wrong school, joined the wrong church?
We take these things to the Lord who did everything right so that we are fully accepted by him. Our acceptance with God is not based on whether we’ve failed in life, fear failing, or think we’ve failed. Our acceptance with God is based on the success of Someone else.
The People Don’t Want to Hear
The Lord responds to Moses’s honest faith with renewing grace. Unfortunately, this renewal did nothing for Israel (v. 9). People who’re suffering often don’t want to hear God’s word. Pain often drowns out his voice.
But God tells him to go to Pharaoh anyways (vv. 10-11). Moses wonders how Pharaoh will listen to him if his own people won’t, even pointing out that he has “uncircumcised,” or “failing,” lips (v. 12). He’s possibly referring again to his speech handicap, or like Isaiah, his unworthiness to speak for God. But God says, “Just go and do what I’ve said” (v. 13).
Then in verses 14-25, there’s what appears to be a random genealogy. Its purpose is to show us where Moses and Aaron come from and to validate their authority (vv. 26-27).
In verses 28-30, Moses summarizes what happened before his digression in the genealogy. He repeats his complaint from verse 12, wondering why Pharaoh would listen to him since he speaks with faltering lips. Moses has a genuine question. How will God respond? We’ll see next week.
Pharaoh and Jesus
In Moses’ distress, the Lord doesn’t rebuke him for his lack of faith. Instead, he reassures him of the success of his mission. He sees in his prayer an honesty about where he’s at and responds with buckets of grace.
What kind of God does this? Who responds to sinful people, people who bungle things up, people who fail with grace and patience? The kind of God who’s the antithesis of Pharaoh, the kind of God who doesn’t want to use and abuse his people, but who wants to live with them (6:7) and give them rest.
This text shows us just how different Pharaoh and Yahweh are. One rules with cruelty and injures his people, the other rules with love and heals his people. One makes his people slaves, the other makes them free.
Pharaoh’s yoke is life-sapping; Jesus’ yoke is life-giving. The true God, Jesus (“Yahweh in the flesh”), has a yoke and burden for his people, but it’s “easy” and “light” (Mt. 11:29-30).
Pharaoh gives his people more work; Jesus gives his people rest. Pharaoh has unrealistic and impossible expectations for his servants; Jesus has realistic expectations for his followers.
Pharaoh, and other masters like sin and Satan and every idol we set up before God, impose their yoke upon us. All they care about is keeping us miserable and in bondage.
Jesus offers to share our yoke with us, to help us carry any burden and says, “Anywhere you go, I’ll go to, because we’re yoked together.”
When you fail, which yoke do you put yourself under? Pharaoh’s heavy and harsh yoke, or Jesus’ light and easy yoke?
Pharaoh punishes his servants when they fail him; Jesus died for his. When we turn to him instead of away from him in our failures, with an honest faith, we’ll find renewing grace, and the Lord will say to us, like he said to Moses, “Just wait and you’ll see what I will do.”
[1]Victor P. Hamilton, Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 94.
[2]J. A. Motyer, The Message of Exodus, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2005), 102.
[3]Hamilton, 94, italics his.
[4]The Best Movie of the Year – by Samuel D. James (digitalliturgies.net)